Articles

On Translations of Byzantine Greek: A Bilingual Letter from Vicente Mariner to Andreas Schott in 1617

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Abstract

This article presents an edition of a letter composed in ancient Greek and Latin by the Valencian Hellenist Vicente Mariner and addressed to the Jesuit scholar Andreas Schott in early 1617. The edition is accompanied by an English translation and short explanatory notes. The letter sheds new light on the history of Mariner’s efforts to have his work as a translator of Byzantine Greek texts published. His relationship to Schott, alongside a number of other scholars from the Low Countries, was central to these efforts. Mariner’s use of Greek and Latin side-by-side in his letter has prompted a focused study of code switching between the two languages. This edition makes the complete text available for the first time and also includes a brief introduction to Mariner and the historical context of the letter.

Keywords: Neo-Latin, ancient Greek, translation, Byzantine literature, patristics